David Iscove is creative technology practice lead at Cella by Randstad Digital. At the MarTech Conference next week, he’ll be sharing a new blueprint for customer experience that he summarizes as: “Always on, always listening.” David is one of a number of speakers that will be not only emphasizing customer-centricity but offering actionable advice about how to become a customer-centric organization. There’s that critical step from talking about it to doing it.
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His session will go live at 2.25pm ET on Tuesday, March 19. It’s aimed at helping you:
- Understand the accelerated demand of modern customer expectations.
- Use AI to predict customer needs and next best actions rather than reacting to post-behavior.
- Meet customers with situational relevance based on context and preferences.
In advance of his session, we had some questions for David.
Q: Most organizations think they are putting the customer first? Are they fooling themselves?
A: Many organizations may believe they are customer-centric, but often fail to recognize that it requires a fundamental shift in focus across all aspects of the business. Customer-centricity is not just an initiative or a marketing tactic, but a top-down, organization-wide commitment to recognizing and prioritizing the customer’s influence in every decision and action. Without this holistic approach, efforts to personalize experiences may fall short of truly putting the customer first.
Q: What would be an example of an organization thinking it’s being customer-centric when actually it’s not?
A: A prime example is a company that focuses heavily on collecting customer data but fails to effectively leverage those insights to improve the customer experience. They may invest in a CDP and gather vast amounts of data across touchpoints, but if that data remains siloed or isn’t activated to drive personalized interactions, they’re not truly being customer-centric.
Customer-centricity isn’t just about having a 360-degree view of the customer, but using that understanding to continuously adapt and deliver value. If insights aren’t translated into action, the data becomes a missed opportunity to enhance the customer journey.
Q: Is AI really bringing “always on” content personalization and “always on” listening within the grasp of marketers?
A: Absolutely. The rapid advancement of AI and its application across marketing technology is enabling capabilities that were once impossible. AI-powered tools can now ingest massive datasets, detect patterns, and generate insights with speed and precision that humans can’t match. This allows for the nuanced interpretation of subtle customer signals and the dynamic delivery of hyper-personalized content at more granular levels than humans are capable of achieving manually.
Furthermore, a lot of these capabilities are being built natively into the core platforms marketers use, so there is less of a gap in realizing these benefits.
Q: You talk about “situational relevance.” What does that mean?
A: Situational relevance refers to providing the most appropriate and valuable interaction for a customer based on their specific context at a given touchpoint and moment in time. It goes beyond just knowing who they are, but also understanding what they need and expect right now. This requires interpreting behavioral signals, predicting intent, and aligning the right content, offer, or action instantly. Situational relevance is about being perpetually relevant by recognizing and adapting to a customer’s changing circumstances across their journey.
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